


The Children of Innsmouth

by fire_is_my_happy_place



Category: Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft
Genre: Body Horror, Engulfing, Horror, Other, Tentacles, amorphous beings, egg implantation, fish men, good luck sleeping after this one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-12
Updated: 2016-04-12
Packaged: 2018-06-01 19:20:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6533209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fire_is_my_happy_place/pseuds/fire_is_my_happy_place
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The people of Innsmouth reproduce in a very singular way. With the aid of the god beneath the sea, a woman is lured from her university to become a vessel for the Old Ones, to provide them with a new worshiper and feed its strange desires.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Children of Innsmouth

The town was not on any maps, a fog-shrouded mass shambling out of the darkness like a gutted drunk and falling slowly into the sea. If the Christian god of my childhood exists, it will remain unmapped, hidden from that all too human urge to explore the forbidden, the lemming urge to rush in and share horrors.

I came across it by accident. Between fall and spring semesters at my university, a darkness crept over me, restless and draining, nights blurring into days and all lumbering into a sense of suffocation that closed the brick walls of the university around me. It was all I could do to finish my course work. I can only compare it to a voice calling me, tantalizingly under the edge of my hearing, the pattern of my name all but lost.

The very day I submitted my last paper, I shoveled my clothing into a duffel bag, loaded my car with books, and started driving toward the coast. I had the strangest conviction that the sight of the ocean would cure me, as if it somehow held the key that would open the skies back up and let me breathe.

I drove through back road after back road, driven by an inarticulate need, winding away from the highways and through towns that still sported the signs my grandparents must have seen when they were children, the obscenely wholesome cherry cheeks of children long since dead. Town residents grew older as well, gnarled and quiet, as set in their ruts as the trees they resembled. They watched me warily as I drove through, window down and fingers trailing in the bitter air.

I should have wondered why they seemed to fear me. I should not have written it off as the fear of youth or change. Gods, how I wish I had been able to think.

The tang of salt had just started to spice the air when my car died, choking and coasting to a stop in the strange twilight. Excitement swept me. Goosebumps, the hair on my arms standing up fine and nearly painfully erect against the blanketed moisture that hung around me.

It is odd to me that I would not have asked why, would not have wondered what motivated this strange, twisting rush to the sea. I was to be a scientist—a marine biologist. I had a mind honed by questions, a mind given shape by the keen knowledge that we did not know.

And yet I did not ask. I could do nothing but tuck a few books into my duffel bag and swing it over my shoulder, following the winding, single-lane road as it cut through the twisted, salt-lashed trees toward distant yellow lights.

The moon rose early that night, quickly spilling silver over the unkempt fields around me. Chewed fragments of fence fell away as it neared the road, and I cut through the jagged openings headed toward that light, absently shrugging my bag back up as it slid away from me.

I did not encounter a soul until I had nearly reached the town. Beneath the ragged eaves of an outbuilding, a collection of anonymous lumps stood up, becoming a man whose face was a suggestion beneath the broad brim of his hat. He looked me up and down, by the movement of his head, and reached out for my bag. At the time, his gesture merely struck me as courteous. My shoulder ached beneath the bag, and I was all too happy to surrender it.

I gave him my hand as well, my fingers exploring the delicate webs between his fingers with a dull throb of shock. These mutations were not unheard of—a tail, webbing between fingers and toes, a jaw that receded into a muscular neck—the product of a too small gene pool and something I was too polite to mention.

His hand was fever-hot to the touch, and it seemed only natural to let him link his arm through mine and walk me into town, the pale yellow light resolving into the bug-clotted eyes of old sodium lamps, spreading  pale and lambent pools in the silvery dark. He led me to an inn of some sort, or perhaps just a bed and breakfast. I could not read the sign, but the door opened in front of us and let me into a lobby festooned with fishing nets and hung with buoys, plastic fish, and other nautical nonsense.

I could see his face, then. Large, expressive eyes the color of deep water, a small nose like a blade, and great, pouting lips. He smiled encouragingly at me and patted my hand before letting my bag down beside me.

They were all silent. The man, the woman behind the desk whose face made it clear that they shared blood, the faces that peered around the doorways as she led me to a room—all silent but for the whisper of cloth and the creak of footsteps as we walked.

And still I could hear it, sibilance on the edge of hearing, clearer now but still indistinct and coupled to a sense of waiting that was nearly acute. A party waiting to begin, the reverent pause before a fine meal, the knowledge that one’s lover waited a few feet away.

I took a breath to speak, but she laid her finger against my lips, the slight roughness of her calluses reminding me of scales. I shivered at her touch, a quiver that stirred my breasts to aching against the confines of my bra. When she removed her finger, I closed my mouth again, unable to remember the thought I had nearly spoken.

She gestured toward the mattress and I was overcome with exhaustion, my bones aching. It was all I could do to shuffle toward the mattress and fall into it. As I plummeted over the edge of sleep, I felt her strip me, rolling me from side to side. Even a vague sense of alarm was not enough to keep me from hurtling away into the darkness.

I could not say how long I slept, only that I needed that sleep as an addict needs drugs. When I woke, it was still dark, or perhaps it was always dark in that town. The woman from the desk struck a match, the rasp stunningly loud, and lit a candle. I sat up, letting the blanket fall from me.

I had ever been modest. Never one to pranks, to the parade of mild naughtiness that seemed to so preoccupy the students at my university. I had always been a quiet girl, a shadow in libraries and a vague presence at a desk in the classroom.

And yet I stood, naked and pale in the flickering light of the candle, and let her draw a tattered white robe over my head, to hang off my shoulders and flutter in the cold. The cloth was some crude burlap, or a poorly woven cotton, neither warm nor concealing, it seemed a mere ornament to my nudity. I looked down, seeing the outline of my body through it without shame, without any emotion but a dim sense of longing.

The sight pleased her, and it again seemed natural to let her draw my arm through hers and lead me down into the dreamlike hallways. The inn was full, so many faces with huge, blinking eyes, the stamp of their shared blood making it clear that the town was made of brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, and combinations thought obscene by the world around. They let their hands drift across me as I walked between them, each feverish hand striking like sparks in the somnambulant currents of my nerves. I could feel their welcome in it, in the lingering rasp of fingers across my hip, across the unclothed curve of my shoulder and the unbound weight of my hair. I wanted to close my eyes and stand for a moment in them, letting them stroke me in a way that felt like the greeting of a family I’d never known.

The inn-keeper led me on, passing away from the rooms and lobby, into a wide room that cupped twin doors, open to the shore. The ocean churned, burbling, inches from the weathered wood, as she stopped and let my arm slide from hers. She retreated and I stood alone, the tattered hem of the dress playing across my shins and wrists.

I could almost hear a voice, almost the sound of lips speaking, the faint puff of hot, wet air near my ear, the animal warmth of a body next to mine. My eyelids grew heavy, a poppy weight that sent questing fingers down me with the sticky cling of honey.

Behind and around me, finally, a sound—a wordless drone, so deep as to be a vibration that tapped me as if I were a tuning fork, a strange, wandering sound that shivered away from music. With a great groan, the townspeople greeted something.

I opened my eyes as it rose from the water, and even the lethargy which had painted me with careless pleasure was not enough to keep me from gasping.

A great ridge rode its back, spines like the catfish rising to sting the air. Heavy gills strained one last time and flattened, leaving only the shadowed suggestion of their gape. Great, malevolently yellow eyes flickered as a membrane drew itself across them, above the wickedly sharp fangs that crowned its mouth. Powerful shoulders, muscle bending in a way no human could mimic, shifted, and it opened a webbed hand, offering me the sight of pale, iridescent scale along its wrists and crawling up the inside of its arms to the great, convex shield of its chest.

To my horror, it was male, and pronouncedly so—a large slit in its abdomen gaped open, displaying a barbed organ that resembled nothing so much as a harpoon. A thick tail lashed behind it, layered with fins. I could not understand how it could swim, and indeed how it existed at all. Its limbs were too long to allow it to slip through the water easily, and the multiple joints of its spindly legs suggested nothing so much as a goat.

The gasping moans of the townsfolk behind me stopped, and I understood them to have been singing a welcome to it. In the ominous silence, its webbed feet smacked against the floor, leaving puddles that sank into the cracks between the floorboards.

I stood, rooted to the floor, too terrified to run or even to move, my heart fluttering like a trapped bird in my chest. When it reached me, it made a guttural noise that no human throat could mimic and, fast as a striking snake, it stung me in the throat with a barb concealed in its great, webbed hands.

The poison spread like acid, burning through my veins as though it were melting them. When it reached my heart, I had only enough time to gasp before it felt as if that organ, too, were melting. As I gasped out my last breaths, it dragged me toward the water, my eyes rolling wildly in the cup of my skull.

And then, as I hit the water, sweet relief—I could breathe again. And more than that, the sensation that I was somehow, profoundly at home. The fish-man, for I can only call it that, tugged at my arm again, towing me out into the water and rushing down until even the pale light of the moon had been swallowed up.

I was too stunned, by that time, to do other than let him drag me along, the thin cloth of my dress plastered to my hips.

I could not tell you how long we sank into the depths, only that time kept passing, the dim forms of rocks and fantastic undersea creatures flashing into being beside us and falling away. In the distance, a pale light beckoned, and my captor swam toward it powerfully, despite my dead weight.

I cannot describe the city I saw, the nacreous and crusted walls that rose over my head. The voice was back, speaking somehow past my ears and into the tangle of my body, where it resonated as if I had been made to hear it.

Emotions, confusing and alien, a sense of great longing, a need that was terrible in its nakedness, the promise of being consumed, of unspeakable pleasure in being reft from my body and becoming a part of something new, something better.

Had I been breathing, I would have been panting, my chest heaving, blood boiling with voluptuous hunger. Something waited for me, and I needed, as I had never before needed anything, to find it. The fish-man towed me on, the gnarled rock walls around us opening into a square. And in it, a shape that I struggled to comprehend, a slimy mass that pulsed, as with the beat of an alien heart, that even as I thrust myself through the cold water to meet it, grew psuedopods and great tentacles and reached for me.

And when it touched me—it was like nothing I can describe, like nothing I have felt before or since, my body a fountain of violent sparks, a hunger that was ecstatic in its pain. It towed me in, flowing into the space around my body until it had engulfed me to the neck in slick pressure. I clawed at it, trying to bring myself in closer. This was the source of the voice I had heard, the source of my need to see the ocean, the amorphous need that sent honeyed fire through me.

When it had settled me securely into itself, I felt it start to extend into me. A thin, questing finger wormed between my swollen lips, pushing itself inside me at first tentatively, and then more firmly. After a moment, another slithered into the tight channel of my ass, creeping up further and further until I could feel it like a snake in my gut. Still another explored the seam of my mouth and pushed into it, letting me lap at it eagerly before pressing down on my tongue.

It invaded me utterly, and when it had found the limits of my body, its fingers grew thicker, exploring the dimensions of my body, going from a tickling, exploring finger to a throbbing weight that filled me until I could not keep my eyes open, my skin shivering and muscles twitching without my control.

It was an inhuman ecstasy, something so violently pleasurable that it has no name, no translation in the languages of men. If it had chosen to split me open, I would have died in an explosion of pleasure that would have obliterated any other sensation. I could not care if the fish man was still watching me, could not name my college or even have repeated my name.

Pleasure was a river coursing through me, too powerful and wicked to permit me thoughts or even the rags of my humanity. It wound through my gut, fingers meeting somewhere inside my chest, into the frail shell of my ears and the twin slits of my nose, into the thin tube of my urethra, forcing its way past the flap with a sweet burn, and through the tiny hole of my cervix and into the cup of my womb.

I could feel a lump moving through it where it lay there, a great swelling that nearly tore me in half as it forced its way inside me. Dimly, somewhere in the torrent, I knew it had placed something inside me, and if I could have screamed, I might have, but I could not move. I could not do anything but shudder, my skin jumping and twitching beneath its engulfing embrace, mindless.

Even with my horror, I cried as it began to pull itself out of me, sliding limply from between my thighs and vomiting out of my mouth. I hung in the water, unable to focus my eyes or even to think as the fish man wrapped himself around me, and with a dart of his hips, impaled me on the barbs which jutted poisonously from him.

I did scream then, my abused throat releasing a spray of bubbles and a sound as much like a creak as anything else. It was agony, an agony that felt as if it would finish the job and rip me in half.

A tearing movement inside me, and he pulled himself away, blood spooling tails into the water from between my thighs. He grabbed my arm then and towed me away, still facing the blushing mass in the square.

Some time later, he deposited me on the shore, a second pulse beating in the bowl of my hips. The innkeeper dragged me the rest of the way, hanging limply from her arms. My stomach was already gravid, and I understood dimly that whatever else had happened, I had carried something ashore with me, born of the amorphous mass in the depths of the ocean and the fish man. Together with another of the townsfolk, they propped me up in a birthing chair I had only seen in museums.

My dream had become gravid with a nightmare, as was I, something squirming inside me and pushing to be let out. It did not take long before I could see the pale wall of an egg protruding from me. The innkeeper smiled encouragingly, and I hated her, wanted to smash her skull against the walls of the room. Instead I pushed, grunts torn from me as my flesh gave way. She caught the egg before it could break on the floor and they tossed me a towel before leaving me in a room with my duffel, to clean myself as best I could and dress again in clothes that felt alien to me.

But dress I did, cringing at the feel of pants against my thighs. Even then, even after that, I could hear the voice of that mass beneath the waves, and it woke shivers of anguished pleasure in me.

I understood then that I could come back again, that if I waded out into the water the fish man would find me and I could go back, could truly become one with it.

I ran from the town, ran until my legs gave out and blood made an apron in my jeans. I ran until a farmer found me and drove me back to the highway without comment, his eyes stealing back again and again to the blood and the drying rime of salt and slime that peeled from my face.

I return to my studies with a vengeance. I will figure out what it is.

And I will destroy it for what it has done to me.

**Author's Note:**

> A request from my Steam profile: a quasi-Lovecraftian bit of smut that has more in common with horror than smut. Prose is purple because of the source material, so if it looks like I've forgotten periods, blame Lovecraft.


End file.
